Cloud First

Let’s first of all mention, before going into specific area’s of Sitecore 9, that Sitecore 9 was developed with a Cloud First approach. All refactorings and offerings in Sitecore 9 will work immediately in the cloud, such as xDB Cloud, EXM etc…

Dynamic Placeholders

With Sitecore 9, Sitecore finally added Dynamic Placeholders into the platform. Content and Experience editors can now finally leverage the flexibility of creating dynamic layouts, with rows and columns from within the Experience Editor, without having the need of a developer to add that functionality to the platform first.

This functionality was asked for for the last 5 years now, and finally we have it in the end product out of the box, which is great that Sitecore finally took the time to offer the best option in terms of Dynamic Placeholders into the platform.

Headless

With the release of Sitecore 9, Sitecore invested a lot into the area of headless support. Content Microservices and APIs are the key towards the future architecture of digital experiences. Today’s full-stack web CMSes mostly have tightly coupling content management to delivery. A headless CMS stores content in pure format, ready for any purpose. It provides access through stateless APIs for authoring, delivery, and analytics and it takes full advantage of the cloud..

The move to Microservices was already started in Sitecore 8.2 with refactoring parts of the platform such as the Publishing Service and parts of the Commerce Service engine to .NET Core. With Sitecore 9, Sitecore continues on this road with decoupling presentation from the CMS and with the use of the JavaScript Sitecore Services Client (JSS), we can now make API calls to get data out of Sitecore in JSON format, to serve our devices needs, which could be front-ends written with ReactJS or native apps etc…

Other innovations

Sitecore 9 offers other enhancements to the platform such as:

New Sitecore Forms module, which replaces the old Webforms for Marketers (WFFM) module

New Migration Tools, such as xDB migration from MongoDB to SQL Server 2016